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TRIMMING THE UNKNOWN
I open the door to the jetsam of black curls
Cast into a linoleum sea
As fluorescent light glints off scissors and smiles.
Smelling the shaving cream and my own fear,
I sit in a distant chair and pick up a magazine,
Glance up from time to time
December 22nd, 2009
Thanksgiving, 1968. I can’t remember what I ate for dinner last night, but I see that day as clearly as if I’m watching it on an old Magnavox. My mother Rose buzzes around our cramped two-bedroom apartment in Queens, New York, her hair in rollers, no makeup. She’s beautiful though, anyone would agree. It’s early in the day. She retrieves the tablecloth my grandmother embroidered when a teenager herself from the back of the hall closet, and sets the dining table in the foyer with her best dishes (black and white Noritake), silver plate from Fortunoff’s, and real cloth napkins in a tasty shade of pumpkin. She’s been up since five cooking; pies were baked the night before. But although her culinary plans are running smoothly, my mother’s mood is lethal.
...November 10th, 2009
In the fall of 1991 I believed I would be the next Charlie Parker. Few of the bands on campus had even heard of Bird, and the few that had did not want a flute player. This did not deter me. I was out on the commons at UCLA riffing on “Confirmation” when Nadine found me.
“That makes my nipples hard.” She smiled.
I lowered my flute and stared. She was wearing a man’s dress shirt, as if she’d spent the night away. The shirt did little to hide the truth of her statement. But that wasn’t what got my attention. It was her face. She had the knack of smiling with her whole face – eyes, cheeks, lips, nose. Everything got into the act.
...July 15th, 2009
Letters
Sometimes the shy miss
with cat eyes
put feather to paper
scratched and restored
worlds of politics
June 1st, 2009
A big mind
Think of One with rare flat-fingered technique,
Hat and Beard gave you a distinct mystique;
Evidence early of genius unique,
Let’s Cool One while your sweet glissandos peak.
April 20th, 2009
Flash Cards
Someone’s gonna be in trouble.
Some kid’s Spanish flash cards
strewn along Maple Avenue
blown down the sidewalk,
lodged in ivy ground cover,
stuck under decrepit concrete
April 12th, 2009
Crazy old man walks up to me
I said, a crazy old man walks up to me
Tells me what to see
He calls to me
Makes me an offer I can’t refuse
Washes out the flames in my eyes
Burns a hole through the fabric in my clothes
April 7th, 2009
Pantoum: Carson McCullers and Misanthropy at Yaddo
An odd child, I sprawled in bed, conjured her square pale face,
Propelled myself into her enormous dark eyes
And imagined, for years, that I curled inside her mind.
At Yaddo I drank sherry from a thermos, strode lank-legged
March 22nd, 2009
There’s this painting she keeps staring at.
She imbibes it, absorbs everything it has to offer. A lilting shade of lavender, it features fourteen flawless flowers arranged with a meandering dissonance that flies in the face of the frame’s four square corners. They make its math seem maddening, symmetry superfluous.
“I like it,” she says quietly, tucking long brown strands of slightly curly hair behind her ears. She turns towards me slowly then, notes the slight adversarial something in my eyes. Intimately familiar with my proclivity for irreverent mocking, she now offers a slight smirk that seems just one shade shy of sly. Aware of my antagonism,
...March 15th, 2009
jazz jam
so this is what no lessons gets me –
a melancholy jazz blues progression,
transgressions and mistakes.
the melody hidden in the missing bass line.
the absent drums beating paradiddles to variation.
a theme within a theme.
March 8th, 2009
What’s Ours
it may be that a long time ago, as a baby,
we chose the way we tasted sugar
felt cotton and heard Bessie Smith
at 3 a.m. in the back of a dream
February 25th, 2009
THE BUNKER
An overgrown trail is abruptly halted by a set of rusting metal gates,
Secured to a crooked post by a battered padlock and feeble chain.
A grey guard tower lies out of sight, studying the unfolding scene intently,
From the dense undergrowth where fresh raindrops glisten in the new-born sunlight.
January 22nd, 2009
Pondering the Musical Style of Thelonious Monk
The-
lon- i-
us-
Monk- plunk!
makes- one-
think-
plink!
his-
next-
note-is-
sunk-
January 4th, 2009
If Mom and Dad had heard about my friend Benny and all that jazz from me, they’d have handled it. But when my fifth grade teacher ratted on us, it became a big, fat deal. Mom had to meet me in the front office after school and we silently trudged back to my classroom, both taking refuge in our own mental world.
Mrs. Drake motioned us to identical chairs in front of her desk. “I don’t want to alarm you. This isn’t an emergency, Mrs. McKenzie.” She forced her goosy face into a sympathetic mask. “Cathy’s not a problem child by any means.”
Mom’s shoulders relaxed under her starched cotton housedress, but her hands clutched the white gloves and tooled leather pocketbook positioned mid-lap.
...November 7th, 2008
Jazz Climax
for Sony Holland
The room hauntingly still
with mosaic tiles staring down
upon the audience.
Pink and red lights glare
like the eye of a storm
August 25th, 2008
My father was a Catholic jazz musician
Say one Our Father, two Hail Marys,
and listen to twelve recordings of John Coltrane.
Dip your fingers in the font of holy water,
cross yourself,
make your way to a pew,
genuflect, take your seat,
and meditate on the perfection of Thelonious chords.
August 6th, 2008
The first of my notes read I’M IN A STATE OF DISBELIEF. I left this one on top of a counter at a place where many of the thousands of people who worked in the same building as I did went to get their coffees and pastries in the morning.
The second note went AN ANGEL GOT IN BED WITH ME LAST NIGHT — OR MAYBE IT WASN’T AN ANGEL. I taped this one to the inside of the door of one of the stalls in the public bathroom of the same building.
...July 10th, 2008
November 14
I have to admit. this
is a new one. playing baby-sitter
to a girl, barely
reaching my hip holster. when
she comes to the door, toast
May 27th, 2008
LIPS OF ORPHEUS
Orpheus-
that bony black Jazz player
inhales slowly, his aged, tarred lungs
sip the pre-melodic air,
he fingers the cold brass scythe,
prolonging the moment
for his lips to buzz;
and they will, Emily,
they will.
April 19th, 2008
Piano Rain
Cut-crystal 16th notes
scamper and dangle
drop
splink
twinkly-plink
splank
...April 15th, 2008
“Ms. Cynthia Jazz”
Obese peacock clouds
Waltzing free from oil paintings
Summer flamboyance bristles
Under skies of no particular color
...March 30th, 2008
Hip Hop Flavored Preachin’
Ya’ll better check your roots
You bunch of brutes
Cause you ain’t got no soul
Respect and you don’t roll
This is rhythm and blues?
Man, I don’t know
Back when we had dancin’ shoes
And things to lose
March 22nd, 2008
Beat
Mad jazz singers blaring,
the gathered dance and bop
Tossing ladies between their legs,
hair slicked back and eyes shimmering
March 9th, 2008
I can’t fight. I’m not made for it. When I’m backed into a corner I can run, and that’s what I’m good at. I can’t gather myself to put up an opposition. I begin to quake and crumble and the parts of myself split into ever-smaller parts that want to get away as fast as possible. I’m an explosion, a spectacle to momentarily confuse the enemy. Also a physical wreck. The only movement that suits me is flight. My parts will converge into a fluid line of energy, but only in movement. It’s the way I’m made. If I held my hand out, lengthened my fingers for you and attempted to keep as still as possible, you would marvel at the trembling. But then give me a guitar and this same hand will produce a line no less marvelous in fluid grace.
...March 5th, 2008
The Crossroads
The Mississippi midnight sky was clear
As one determined man had journeyed far
With nothing but his clothes and a guitar,
To speak the incantation all men fear;
February 14th, 2008
The road to Giverny,
winter, 1885, by Claude
Monet, looks sad.
It looks like the
twisted road to San
Quentin, where an
execution is planned
before Christmas 2005.
January 29th, 2008
Listening to Trane
Madman rages burst
from his golden horn-
Through John’s mouthpiece
galaxies of enlightened energy
were born-
Trane’s band wailed
in dissonant bawling
January 19th, 2008
BLACK SONG FOR BILLIE HOLIDAY
The night the blue saxophones died
You still remain in the spotlight’s ivory heat
A riddle that puzzles the heart
Snatching from the soil of catastrophe
A nugget of perfect sound
Glowing like an iridescent candle
January 5th, 2008
It had been warm all day, the type of day where the heavy air presses into you and makes it hard to move. It didn’t help that her shift had been spent calling customers and listening to endless streams of why they couldn’t make their hydro payments. And they would yell, swear at her as if she had caused their loss of job, their alcoholism, their way of life. She absorbed it all, the words sinking through the membrane in her ear and resonating within the membrane of her mind long after the calls had stopped.
If there’d been a breeze, or a slight coolness to the air, then those words could have lifted from her. They heated her, churning and boiling within so that by the time she got the apartment door open her flesh looked glossy with the sweat.
...November 1st, 2007
War as a playmate
Look at the pretty girls, pouting
and coloring their pink lips with a reddish hue.
Embellishing their glossy gossamer hair
Saturating themselves with perfume.
October 29th, 2007
The gift
The day my mother dropped a net
of oranges on the kitchen table
and the net broke and the oranges
rolled and we snatched them,
my brother and I,
peeled back the skin and bit deep
October 18th, 2007
COUTURE
stained
this is
pale
yellow brown
along
the hem
but
too nice
August 30th, 2007
CONVERSATION ON ROUTE 23 NORTH, NOVEMBER 1987
He leans on me like a rusted bicycle,
Tires flat against the weathered south wall
Of a lonesome, abandoned barn
Slumps into the rear seat of his old Ford
Station wagon, no longer capable of riding
August 23rd, 2007
Stories burst out of her as a magician’s trick pulls out scarves; multi-colored patterns, solids and conservative checks spilled out of her mouth and hands when she least expected it. In the end, of course, she recognized it as it was. These were the stories of all our lives, every human soul’s experience could produce that knotted, impossibly long scarf string that sprung out of the local magician.
Yet, most people did not have a new story to tell very often at all. At first, this was a wonder to her — why did all the interesting things happen only to her? But of course, this was self-centered, she realized. These things do happen to all of us on this earth. It was just that few people noticed the stories as they blossomed. It’s in the observation of it, she discovered, that one finds a good story.
...July 15th, 2007
MATCHBOOK: The Spinnaker (Sausalito)
in memory of Bill Evans
by Michael Harper
Adrift in your own spittle
(eyebrows on vibrato knuckles)
we are across the bay
from reality;
but reality hits in waves
...May 22nd, 2007
Morning
From the center of our body
Come the bright flowers.
Draw open the curtain
...April 29th, 2007
“To a Flower”
Garden rose
My perfumed lover
Porcelain daughter of the summer
Your blossom is my red maiden
April 27th, 2007
TATTOO
featuring Dexter Gordon
by Michael Harper
Though a simple rose under your skin
I look up the bugle ritual of recall
for sailors to regroup — soldiers at parade rest
and your sister who could not read as a child
April 25th, 2007
I have a problem, Father.
No, no “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” and the rest. Not this time.
And that’s it, really: I’m here again, in confession with you, as I have been for a long time, but I don’t think I’ve sinned.
Yes, of course, Father, I understand about confession. Penance, really, because that’s a sacrament, that’s how a person gets forgiveness of sins. There is absolution by a priest, but you I, because I am sitting here now have to have true sorrow and confess your sins, and do something about your behavior. You really have to mean it, not just want a pass for what you’ve done and may do again, unless you’re genuine in your confession and really want to change.
...March 15th, 2007
FOR COUNT BASIE
On this day, your birthday, I want
to celebrate, although you passed last
century. I crave some birthday cake,
so I put on “One O’clock Jump”
one more time to soothe my soul, allow
your fingers to loosen my tight, sore
muscles that have taken hold, the ones
February 22nd, 2007
10’S & THINGS
in memory of Carmen McRae
by Michael Harper
Fingerings,” she says, a nobody,
intermission pianist
February 22nd, 2007
9 23 99: Coltrane Notes on the Millenium
by Michael Harper
“Alabama”
no protection still
that is not churchdriven
James Weldon Johnson’s alternate tune
January 22nd, 2007
Blues for Red
I’m looking in crowds
where you won’t be
looking for you
strolling with Raphael
...December 29th, 2006
January 30, 1946 — Allied Headquarters, Paris, France
“What is it, Captain? I’m very busy.”
“Sorry to disturb you, Colonel, but you said you wanted a report as soon as I completed my investigation.”
Colonel Washburn searched his desk muttering, “Yes, yes. I’ll read your report as soon as you’ve filed it.”
...November 10th, 2006
Scarecrow Gardens
Late-summer squash put out to sea
in coastal storms. All day, wet
leaves let go. I cut down three
...August 31st, 2006
Rhythms Of Life
The ferment of storm to seas
The seas’ mad tides
Our savage hearts to spawn
In the wild shoals of swollen rivers
Druid fires – spiraling discs
Raspy winds and blind/blue passions
August 22nd, 2006
The Life of Jackie Mclean
by Michael Harper
A critic trying to pass writes me about crossover played some
couldn’t make it got his Ph. D
(he’s onto new changes an advance man now active in grants
from corporations)
August 8th, 2006
Megan Watson pushes open the front door of the old house, escaping the cold. On the left, a welcome mat, wet from snow, rests before the entrance to a vegetarian restaurant. Shes not hungry. Turning to the dry stairwell with the faded violin painted on the wall, she begins her ascent to the shop upstairs.
Paper taped at the top stair reads, “Press Doorbell.” When the door draws open, an older gentleman with a full, white mustache, smiles down at her. Running his palm over the top of his head, he looks tired, but curious.
...July 18th, 2006
TATUM
by Michael Harper
I have recovered from your blindness
so fast your arpeggios
the world of Toledo is in slow motion
for you are holding back
May 22nd, 2006
Election Day, 1984
Did you ever see someone coldcock a blind nun?
Well, I did. Two helpful idiots
Steered her across the tarmac to her plane
May 21st, 2006
Kind of Blue
New York
&
cross
the
Lincoln
tunnel
expose a city
through
fish eye lens
May 2nd, 2006
ON MEETING ERIC DOLPHY
Between sets at the Five Spot,
She and Dolphy would
walk and talk
April 1st, 2006
dear jesse helms
something is happening.
something obscene.
in the night sky
the stars are bursting
March 15th, 2006
The whole stalking thing started with the footprints. They were so large that his size twelve’s fit easily into the indents in the snow, and the space between them was so wide that following them forced him into an awkward little step-jump. Large paw prints ran parallel to the human prints. He assumed that they belonged to a dog. What else could they be? Yet, what did he know about the customs or recreational habits of these Northern Maine people? For all he knew they strutted through the pines chatting with bears.
...March 8th, 2006
The Poet’s Heart
Think of the buddhist monks
who sat in the road
at the start of the war,
saffron robes soaked in gasoline,
and set themselves on fire
January 29th, 2006
My father died quickly and cleanly in the waning days of autumn, just two months before the arrival of the millennium. A massive neural hemorrhage took him — his brain, drowned in blood, was gone within hours. It was ironic that his own blood finally accomplished what years of alcoholism had not: heavy as his drinking was, he remained utterly lucid and sharp until the early morning hours of a late October Tuesday, when a tiny blood vessel in his head gave way, loosening the flood of fluid that killed him. Until then, his memory, both short and long-term, remained unimpaired. True, his body was falling apart; his liver and heart were bad, he suffered from diabetes, gout, macular degeneration — you name it, he had it — but his mind remained as sharp as the day he graduated with a PhD from Harvard.
...November 1st, 2005
From “Back to the Valley”
I guess mebbe you better be getting me home
now, it’s getting pretty late
and I’m getting pretty drunk
and tired
I got to get back on that swaker tomorrow
September 29th, 2005
S’monka Tetes
These sounds forever
begin with a few off key
notes. A funny dance
and like Joseph’s coat many
September 22nd, 2005
“Born Into a World Knowing”
This will happen
Oh god we say just give
me a few more
breaths
and don’t let it be
August 1st, 2005
(One)
She has begun to daydream about having an affair.
She imagines herself with the men she sits next to at dinner parties, their wives across the table pulling down their mouths as she engages their husbands intensely in conversation, as she lays her hand on their arms and smiles over her wine glass. Then she looks away, smiles at her own husband seated two or three or four people away from her, nods and smiles, raises an eyebrow.
...July 1st, 2005
Because I Am
In mem. Sidney Bechet, 1897-1959
Because I am a memorious old man
I’ve been asked to write about you, Papa Sidney,
Improvising in standard meter on a well-known
Motif, as you did all those nights in Paris
And the world. I remember once in Chicago
June 29th, 2005
The rigid wooden slats of the park bench press relentlessly against the length of my goose-pimpled back. A stocking cap rides low over my ears and most of my forehead, and a wool blanket — cocooned around my prone body — laps over my chin and tucks snugly around the sides of my face. Only my eyes, nose, and weather-cracked lips brave the raw chill. I gaze skyward as the frozen minutes slowly pass. I wouldn’t normally choose to rest here in the dead of winter, but tonight I didn’t have a choice. In life you are either a have or a have-not. Mike and I are have-not’s.
...March 15th, 2005
SO WHAT
Baptized by vodka cleansing my throat
Baptized by sweat dripping from Tony Williams’ sticks
Thick  Summer Sunday Afternoons
at the Vanguard
February 4th, 2005
The workers at Jackson’s favorite record store wear bumble-bee striped tights, black plastic glasses, leather boots that lace straight up their thighs. Jackson’s wearing the purple beret he always wears, with his blond hair sticking out in back, and his cords, and his corduroy jacket that smells like him. It’s April, too warm for corduroy, but Jackson always wears corduroy, along with T-shirts that tell the world he’s been to every blues concert and jazz festival you could think of.
To me, it all sounds the same — jazz, the blues, whatever — it’s all horns, but Jackson’s got two hundred seventeen records — vinyl, he calls them — and a saxophone, too. Clearly, he’s got music in his blood. His dad also plays the saxophone, at bars in Harvard Square, and they kind of look alike, only Jackson’s dad has eyes like power drills that would tear your clothes clean-open if you didn’t look away in time.
...November 1st, 2004
Soul Make a Path Through Shouting
for Elizabeth Eckford
Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957
Thick at the schoolgate are the ones
Rage has twisted
Into minotaurs, harpies
Relentlessly swift;
So you must walk past the pincers,
October 17th, 2004
Today, Celina is going tolive up to the promise she made to him fifteen years ago, that November dayin the neurologist’s parking lot, when he told her, “When my voice goes,I go.”
Ray can still hear the pitter-patter of raindrops onthe umbrella they’d shared that day, drumming out the minutes that passedas they stood, emotionally and physically immobile, terrified at the thoughtof taking another step. And he can still recall the wet wool smell of hersweater when he tucked his face into the hollow of her neck to hide his tears.But he thought Celina had chosen to forget that day and her vow, until twomonths ago when she asked him if he’d changed his mind. “Squeeze my arm ifyou still want to,” she’d told him.
...July 1st, 2004
There are coyote in The Balcones Canyonlands Preserve in West Travis County, Texas. One family; with three cubs. As always, the alpha female is the only one to breed, her two sisters will help her rear the cubs to maturity. She is a young female, less than two years old, and her sisters are her littermates: this family, barely more than striplings themselves, have fought hard to establish themselves in this reserve, managed for deer and birds, but not for coyote. Most Texans still shoot first, and ask themselves only afterwards if the beautiful golden corpse in front of them could possibly have posed a risk to livestock or pets.
...March 5th, 2004
One. Anacostia lay there. Two. Three. Counting gunshots. Four. Five. He imagined the bullets cutting the sky, wondered how this tradition had begun. Six. The first time he held a gun, fired his first shot, he was six years old. It was on this same night — New Year’s Eve — thirteen years ago, just after midnight. Seven.
* * *
His father’s yellowy, roach-burnt fingertips stretched and folded his hand, his small fingers, barely skilled using a pencil, around the handle and trigger. I’m gonna make you a man. A chill shook his small body. He had never felt anything so cold, not a popsicle fresh from the ice cream truck, not the cold air gushing from inside the fridge onto his face in summer. Not even snow was this cold. When he had finished molding the boy’s hand to the gun, he let go. It fell immediately to Anacostia’s knees. A flat, open palm, smacked the back of his head. You ain’t no bitch. Lift that gun up, boy!
...October 15th, 2003
Though she sat alone, Mira wasn’t lonely. Woman, chair, patio, trees and sky merged in her nightly meditation. Mira finished her prayer, touching the crown of her head, forehead and heart center with folded hands, crossed herself, and opened her eyes to the East, observing in one smooth movement her indigenous heritage, Catholic upbringing, and conversion to Buddhism.
Gathering and tossing her long raven-wing hair over one shoulder, Mira shifted her weight from one hip to the other, rubbing her ample belly. She turned over mental stones from the last few months, examining the process of shock, resignation, and acceptance that marked this pregnancy. The youngest of five daughters, she ruefully watched her older sisters succumb one by one to the entanglements of family life. She vowed while still a teenager to never clip her wings.
...June 15th, 2003
Donna walked into the student union on the evening of the Kent State shootings while thunderheads roiled over the Toledo River. They invoked little-girl notions that God brought storms until she checked herself with the atheism sweeping the Milestone College campus that semester. In the foyer mirror she stroked long chestnut hair and nodded terse approval of her denim mini-skirt, leotards, and khaki jacket.
Descending the circular staircase to the basement, Donna replayed the scene in the dining commons–Chris, flanked by his entourage, requesting that she report after dinner; how girl friends had flashed wide-eyed grins that heightened her excitement–“God, Donna! No freshman poly-sci’s ever been invited to work with him before!”
...February 10th, 2003
I like the jazz because it plays in different colors: deep green and blue, translucent purple, ivory black; city storefronts, magenta sunsets; watercolor splashes here and there like a yellow crocus on snow or an orange goldfish tail — sudden, surprising, but always carefully placed.
Like the way people come in different colors — they just don’t know it. People walk along in darkness daily, ignorant of the color that’s surrounding them or the beat their music plays. That’s what I’m lying here thinking about, in my dark bedroom between the folds of cotton sheets. Africans, Asians, Seminoles they all come in different colors — not their skins, but their insides.
...October 4th, 2002
”Every Time” by Michel Krug
The Sunday Poem is published weekly, and strives to include the poet reading their work.... Michel Krug reads his poem at its conclusion
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